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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

LGBTQ Poetry

Celebrate pride and explore the rich tradition of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer poets and poetry through a showcase of audio, video, poetry, and prose—resources as exciting and diverse as the communities they represent.

Featured Essays

Queer Poets on the Poems That Changed Their LivesIn celebration of LGBTQ Pride Month, we asked several poets to tell us about the poems that influenced their lives as LGBTQ writers and individuals. Read about the powerful and long-lasting impact poetry had on their identity.

The Letter QThe poets in this collection—Ching-in Chen, Timothy Liu, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eileen Myles, Ely Shipley, and Stacy Szymaszek—present letters they’ve written to their younger selves about their queer identities and experiences.

Eros and the Lyric Imagination, by Marilyn HackerMarilyn Hacker discusses eros as the “fuel of the lyric imagination” and discusses a selection of lyric poems featuring and fueled by eros.

Notes Toward Beauty, by Reginald Shepherd“Without a notion of beauty, an embodiment of the possible beyond the abjections of the mundane, I would not have become a poet,” Shepherd writes in this essay on beauty.

From the Archive

Featured Books

Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time edited by Carl Morse and Joan LarkinPublished in 1988, Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time: An Anthology collects nearly one hundred varied and distinct gay and lesbian voices of American culture.read more

Breezeway by John Ashbery"Punctuated by unsettling questions that keep pace with the cultural moment, Ashbery’s latest offers a collage of marginalia brought to center stage and eerily lit by a submerged psychic disturbance."read more

Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart"This massive volume compiles Bidart’s 1990 collected, In the Western Night: 1965–1990 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the four books he has published since, and sixty-odd pages of startling new verse."read more

Anybody by Ari Banias "Ari Banias’s first book is the portrait of an inner life that asks itself steadily how anybody or any body can be said to be anybody—girl, boy, fox, or cop."read more

Tiger Heron by Robin Becker"In her eighth book, poet and feminist scholar Robin Becker reconciles with the reality of middle age—caring for ailing parents (and wishing, futilely, for “dying to be Mediterranean, / curated, a villa, like the Greek sanatoria”) as well as a slowly unraveling relationship of seven years."read more

gowanus atropolis by Julian Talamantez Brolaski"Julian T. Brolaski’s debut is a linguistic adventure, a series of narratives that blend high and low diction."read more

The New Testament by Jericho Brown“Jericho Brown’s second book fulfills the promise of its audacious title, offering updated gospel dealing with race and sexuality in contemporary America, where ‘[e]very last word is contagious.’”read more

Apocalyptic Swing by Gabrielle Calvocoressi“Gabrielle Calvocoressi moves from life to life in poems that are at once personal and draw from a communal sense of history and popular culture. These poems are often set in the past but speak to the ever-present concerns of sexuality, faith, and violence.”read more

Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy"James Merrill called the first edition of this collection 'The best [English version] we are likely to see for some time.'”read more

When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz"In this poignant debut, Natalie Diaz writes as a sister who is struggling with her brother’s drug addiction, within a family dynamic steeped in the mythology and cultural history of reservation life."read more

Paragon Park by Mark Doty"The collection offers readers the intriguing experience of engaging with a well-known poet’s first works, some previously published only in small magazines."read more

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg“Howl features Ginsberg’s characteristic use of gritty vernacular and long lines, explicit sexuality, along with descriptions of abject people and places, and the stupor and ecstasy of drugs.”read more

Unpeopled Eden by Rigoberto González“As the title suggests, Gonzalez’s fourth collection is one in which beauty and the allure of utopia are undermined at every turn by death, absence, and exile.”read more

Play Dead by francine j. harris"Scary and purposeful, almost but not quite chaotic, harris’s second volume sets out to shred taboos, defend the vulnerable, remember the dead, and craft a full account of a traumatic, complicated sexual life."read more

In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson "Johnson’s first book of poems takes on subject matter such as growing up queer in America and how politicized the queer female body is."read more

We're On: A June Jordan Reader by June Jordan"This first posthumous volume to hold both her verse and her prose puts her back near the center of conversations where—with Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich—she clearly belongs."read more

I Want to Make You Safe by Amy King"A defiant yet often vulnerable voice rings out in poems that are, as Rae Armantrout writes, 'exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque.'"read more

Polytheogamy by Timothy Liu“In these poems, Liu explores the starkness of sexuality. His poems bluntly re-create a sensual loneliness and violence and the sharp edges of strained dynamics between lovers.”read more

Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life by Dawn Lundy Martin“‘Make an outline around my form. Use your chisel,’ writes Dawn Lundy Martin in her third collection, a critique of common signifiers of gender, race, and sexual identity.”read more

Rapture by Sjohnna McCray"These poems are so beautifully crafted, so courageous in their truth-telling, and so full of what I like to think of as lyrical wisdom—the visceral revelations that only music, gesture and image, working together, can impart."read more

Selected Poems by James Merrill"This volume collects a wide selection of James Merrill’s work over nearly half a century—from First Poems to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Divine Comedies (composed with the help of a Ouija board) to the epic work The Changing Light at Sandover."read more

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems by Eileen Myles“A proud and tough lesbian role model for decades, and a defender of ungentrified, Bohemian downtown New York City, Myles can seem to update the improvisational composition techniques of the Beats, at once offhand and in your face.”read more

Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen"Any reader who encounters Hieu Minh Nguyen’s second collection, Not Here, will likely be struck by the intense sense of longing and hunger that pulses at the center of his poems—the search for human companionship and raw, physical encounters as a means to self-love and social acceptance."read more

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara"Along with his earlier volume, Meditations in an Emergency, his 1964 book Lunch Poems is considered to be his freshest and most accomplished collection."read more

Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich“One of the most influential poets of her generation, Rich led poetic discussions of gender, race, and class and pushed formal and societal boundaries with her writing.”read more

Stranger in Town by Cedar Sigo"Queer identity, love, and city landscapes serve as themes of the collection, and Sigo—with wit and energy—pays homage to heroes Jack Spicer, John Wieners, and Arthur Rimbaud."read more

Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler"The book spans the early 1950s to his death and makes references to weather and nature, his New York School peers (Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara are subjects of several poems), and the everyday."read more

Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith"At once a stunning performer and a tersely effective arranger of words on the page, Smith can address the Black Lives Matter movement, the erasure of black humanity by malign police, and then pivot to vivid, sexy, or scary records from a complex queer sexuality."read more

Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems by David Trinidad“This volume of selected poems, David Trinidad’s twelfth collection, spans three decades of work in a volume that D. A. Powell notes is ‘celebratory in tone, panoramic in scope.’”read more

The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White"Part of the Graywolf Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, which aims to bring essential books of contemporary poetry back into print, James White’s The Salt Ecstasies presents a collection of poems expressing desire and longing."read more

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman"Unusually prescient, even now, Leaves of Grass has become an unavoidable influence on American poetry."read more